Whenever a bug is discovered, it’s immediately apparent that three things have gone wrong. They used the wrong language, and this never would have happened if they’d written it in the bugfree language. They used the wrong development methodology, and this never would have happened if they’d used the prevent this bug technique. And finally, they ignored best practice and didn’t use the proper coding style. The bug would have been extremely obvious if only they’d replaced all v_w_ls with underscores in variable names. Just look at the word v_w_ls. It pops right out.

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The web as we know it will soon crash and burn in a fiery death. 12 days. There’s even a countdown. This is apparently a redux of request smuggling reborn. Request research reborn redux.

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There was an (almost) catastrophic OpenZFS bug. If they had used zig, the bug would be easily detected. But the question remains, could we detect this bug in C?

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Once upon a time, there was a university president who couldn’t send an email more than 500 miles, and the wise sysadmin said that’s not possible, so the president said come to my office, and lo and behold, the emails stopped before going 500 miles. Has technology improved? Can we send an email farther than 500 miles in 2025?

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I had the idea to write a little shell in go. Called gosh, of course. There’s a few people playing with the same theme, but nothing exactly the same.

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People keep telling me that X11 doesn’t support DPI scaling, or fractional scaling, or multiple monitors, or something. There’s nothing you can do to make it work. I find this surprising. Why doesn’t it work? I figure the best way to find out is try the impossible and see how far we get.

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I like to go on the internet and click on links, but some of the links are bad, so then I swipe right to make it go away. The problem is that when I’m running chrome on OpenBSD, the swipe gesture doesn’t seem to work like it does on other platforms. We’re not going to fix it, but we are going to make it work. (Although, I hear the younglings say they swipe right when they like something. Explains a lot, actually.)

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There are a number of network protocols that we might refer to as text protocols, where we send a line of text to the server and it sends back a response. Perhaps I should call them CRLF protocols, to distinguish from protocols where we’re blasting JSON back and forth. To speed things up, it can be tempting to have the client send multiple requests without waiting for individual responses.

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I used to use the go log package, then I switched to the slog package, and it’s been a bumpy ride.

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Apple released “Liquid Glass” which looks a lot like a revival of UI fashion from two decades. Everything is transparent. But I doubt Apple has the courage to bring back wobbly windows. No matter, I hardly move my windows around anyway, but what does move is the text inside. So why not wobbly letters? Wobbletters. Definitely in the category of felt cute might delete later.

My original idea was to add a little spin to each letter as it scrolls. Like the letters are hanging on a backboard, and as it bounces up and down, momentum is transferred to the letters. Didn’t quite make it that far, but maybe next time.

To start, I just wanted to check I could shift the vertices around a bit. The same wobble for every vertex, no distortion.

        var wobblex, wobbley float32
        if smoothAmt != 0.0 {
            wobblex = (rand.Float32() -0.5) / 50.0
            wobbley = (rand.Float32() -0.5) / 50.0
        }
        for k := 0; k < 6; k++ {
                base := &baseverts[x+k]
                base.adj[0] += wobblex
                base.adj[1] += smoothAmt + wobbley
        }

This ended up looking much cooler than I thought. Like a faceted glass privacy screen. Apple should totally add this now. It fits with the glass theme. The sequel to liquid glass, solid glass!

Unfortunately, this renders the text unreadable while scrolling.

Video is at 30 fps, but the illusion is more complete at 90 fps. You no longer see individual letters, just transient edges as they pass by.

<video playsinline controls poster="/images/wobble.jpg">
<source type="video/mp4" src="/images/wobble.mp4">
</video>

Accidentally rebooted after installing this, so I guess it’s wacky week for a while.